Thumbnails!

Dear Best Friends,

After eight weeks of successfully getting my newsletters published on (my own self-inflicted) deadline, I finally let one slip - just by nine or ten hours. I’ve always been slightly annoyed when newsletter authors start a newsletter by announcing and explaining why their newsletter is late, because I don’t think most recipients pay that close attention to when they’re receiving it. But since this Friday newsletter is largely to reflect on my process and progress, it feels worth calling out when I can’t make the schedule I’ve set for myself, since ultimately that might mean that I should change the way I’m operating. So, that has been noted.

BUT, it’s been for good reason. Basically, just because I’ve been doing a lot of things and it’s making me tired, but in a good way. There are a few things I could tell you about, but I’m going to focus on the most exciting one:

Thumbnails!

Did you know that literally everything you could ever post asks for you to make a thumbnail for it? Like, if you have just made the world’s best Instagram reel, or an amazing YouTube video, and you spent so much time editing and adding all the details and descriptions and meta details (no idea what these even are, btw), and you’re about to hit publish and so excited to share it with the world FINALLY… right when you think it’s all done, the thing is like, “now add a thumbnail!” And you try to just scroll through the video and find a clip that looks good, but it all just looks messy or not formatted right for how it’s going to show up in the end and then you have to either resign yourself to showing something ugly OR take all this time to make a new thumbnail. But if you haven’t thought about this much yet, then they all look different and there’s no real logic to the design decisions you’re making, and it ends up looking messy anyway.

The real kicker is that then, if you decide you want to share whatever you just made on different platforms, you discover that every platform requires different SIZE thumbnails and then you have to start the whole process over again and it’s AWFUL.

These are the moments I did not expect to be spending hours on while working on the newsletter/adjacent activities, but end up being the types of things that constantly come up. So after posting a bunch of stuff that looked pretty bad, I decided to dedicate some time to making it nice(r) and establish some kind of template for everything so hopefully it’s a faster process in the future.